2016-10-27

How do we approach lists as objects of research?

shopping_list

Have you forgotten?
item
Warheads Sour Chewy Cubes Assorted Flavours 113G
Bonne Maman Black Cherry Conserve 370G
Kallo Very Low Salt Organic Chicken Stock Cubes 48G
Surf Sensations Delicate Moonflw Liquid 23 Wash
Florette Sweet And Crunchy Bowl 180G

predictive analytics are discoveries of micrological propensities that are not directly correlated with human understanding and affectivity and that do not by themselves cohere into clearly identifiable events (M. Hansen 2015, 111–12)

Whatever explanatory and causal value predictive analytics of large datasets have is, I suggest, ultimately rooted in this ontological transformation whereby probabilities are understood to be expressions of the actual propensity of things (M. Hansen 2015, 120)

1. The context of the presentation: 'statistics and operations research in industry'

patel_notes

Prices and quantities of things in Tesco

Prices and quantities of things in Tesco

name price
Vera Wang Princess Eau De Toilette Spray 100Ml 30.00
Easy Entertaining Extra Large Traditional Fruit Cake 40.00
Baylis And Harding Mandarin And Grapefruit Weekend Bag 40.00
Bollinger Champagne Non Vintage 75Cl 40.00
Fettercairn Fasque 70Cl 35.00
Tesco Finest 2 Beef Fillet Steak 34.00
Oral-B Stages Kids Star Wars Electric Toothbrush 35.00
Philips S3120/06 Shaver 3000 42.74
Dalwhinnie Malt Whisky 70Cl 35.00
Manhattan Plaza Hd-S2 Smart Fsathd Receiver 49.00
Tesco Organic Beef Fillet Steak 34.00
Glenfiddich 12Yo Malt 70Cl 35.00
Bowmore Small Batch Reserve 70Cl 35.00
Easy Entertaining Chocolate Ganache Cake 35.00
Glenmorangie 10 Year Old Malt Whisky 70Cl 35.00
Oral-B Pro 5800 Crossaction Electric Toothbrush 200.00
Eq Nutrition Diet Protein Chocolate 1Kg 38.00
Oral-B Trizone 2000 3D Action Electric Toothbrush 70.00
Philips Qt4013/23 Beard Trimmer 33.24
The Glenlivet 15 Year Old French Oak Reserve 70Cl 35.00

2. The web and the shopping basket: how it was reconstituted in the 1990s

'Every little bit helps':Tesco ClubCard

Humby, 1984

People add to list

The advent of recommender systems

In everyday life, we rely on recommendations from other people. … Recommender systems augment this natural social process. In a typical recommender system, people provide recommendations as inputs, which the system then aggregates and directs to appropriate recipients. In some cases the primary transformation is in the aggregation; in others the system’s value lies in its ability to make good matches between the recommenders and those seeking recommendations.(Resnick and Varian 1997, 56)

Early e-commerce recommender system architecture

3. The rules-based list and the apriori algorithm

##   lhs             rhs                support confidence lift
## 6 {whole milk} => {other vegetables} 0.075   0.29       1.5 
## 5 {whole milk} => {rolls/buns}       0.057   0.22       1.2 
## 4 {whole milk} => {yogurt}           0.056   0.22       1.6 
## 2 {whole milk} => {root vegetables}  0.049   0.19       1.8 
## 1 {whole milk} => {tropical fruit}   0.042   0.17       1.6

Multiplicity will be called ‘closed’ when grasped by the numerical one, and ‘open’ when grasped by the vital One. Every multiplicity is the joint effectuation of the closed and open, but its ‘veritable’ multiple-being lies on the side of the open. (Badiou 2004, 72)

A concept of the open is substantially established once we possess a multiple such that the we dwell within it by taking the intersection of two elements, or the union of many elements as we wish (even an infinity of elements). In the other words, the intersection of two opens is an open, and any union whatsoever of opens remains open. (Badiou 2004, 73)

Tesco surplus

Tesco surplus

4. Hack? Customers go straight to the checkout

Straight to the checkout?

5. 'We have 52 weeks of data for each customer': how is order constructed – from history?

This means, to put it slightly differently, that surrounding any delimited predictive system is a larger field of data – what I elsewhere call a “surplus of sensibility” – that, viewed speculatively, indexes the causal efficacy of the total situation within which this delimited system operates. (Effectively, the latter gains its reliability from closing off this larger surplus of sensibility, thereby transforming an always excessive propensity into a [provisionally] closed dataset.) Because it affords data that exceed whatever any given predictive system might include, the data of the world’s causal efficacy – the data constituting its real potentiality – always and in principle facilitates knowledge that cannot be restricted to any particular agenda (M. B. N. Hansen 2015, 126–7)

6. Gain: use good features to build models

Models

7. Sparsity: output 20 recommendations from 200,000 products

The sparsity of predictions

The sparsity of predictions

10. Experimental settings: A/B allocation and uplift

A/B testing

11. Infrastructure: realtime engine serves up top 5

Realtime infrastructure and its limits

12. Similarity, substitution, complementarity and micrological propensities

Basket similarity

name price
Easy Entertaining Finest British Cheese Board 1.56Kg 25.0
Tesco Easy Entertaining 36 Assorted Mini Cupcakes 700G 13.0
Tesco Easy Entertaining Cream Cake Selection 10.0
Tesco Easy Entertaining Tiramisu 1.1Kg Serves 12 10.0
Easy Entertaining Finest Amontillado Sherry Trifle 815G 8.0
Tesco Finest Amaretti And Amaretto Panettone 750G 8.0
Jacobs Biscuits For Cheese 900G 6.0
Fox's Chocolatey Tin 365G 6.0
Weetabix 72Pk 5.7
Hostess Twinkies Chocolate 10S 385G 5.5
Tesco Belgian Chocolate And Vanilla Cheesecake 1Kg 5.5
Mcvitie's Victoria 650G 5.0
Cadbury Chocolate Collection Tin 340G 5.0
Celebrations Tub 750G 5.0
Fox's Fabulously 600G 5.0
Mcvitie's Moments 400G 5.0
Carrs Selection Box 500G 5.0
Cadbury Mini Fingers Stackable Tin 330G 5.0
Tesco Decorate Your Own Gingerbread House 800G 5.0
Pedigree 4 Pack Tasty Treats Tin 560G 5.0
Jules Destrooper Finest Selection 250G 5.0
Whiskas 1+ Dry Cat Food Biscuits Chicken & Veg 2kg 4.5
Whiskas 1+ Dry Cat Food Biscuits Tuna & Veg 2kg 4.5
Weetabix 48Pk 4.2
Fox's Fabulously Assortment Biscuits 300G 4.0
Dean's Shortbread Assortment 360G 4.0
Mcvitie's Family Circle 720G 4.0
Tesco Scottish Shortbread Assortment Tin 500G 4.0
Pedigree Gravy Bones 1.5Kg 4.0
Tesco Chocolate Biscuit Assortment 450G 4.0

13. Complementarity drives conversion

propensity_matrix

Conclusion

  • the constitutive incompleteness and openness of lists are very closely entangled with problems of social order under predictive conditions
  • shopping lists have complex temporal-material structure, since they mix prediction, infrastructural constraints, the individual characteristics of list-makers, statistical validations, database architectures and above all the surplus sensibility associated with circulation of commodities.
  • shopping lists undergoing a conversion experience as they become more probabilistic, but the idea that probabilities are the closed form of propensities does not account for the distribution of probabilities in relations between things, between people, between people and things, and between things and people.

Badiou, Alain. 2004. Theoretical Writings. Edited by Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano. London ; New York: Continuum.

Hansen, Mark. 2015. “Prediction in the Wild.” In The Nonhuman Turn, edited by Richard A. Grusin. 21st Century Studies.

Hansen, Mark B. N. 2015. Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media. University of Chicago Press.

Resnick, Paul, and Hal R. Varian. 1997. “Recommender Systems.” Commun. ACM 40 (3): 56–58. doi:10.1145/245108.245121.